Thursday, January 26, 2017

Machine Learning the Election

This going to be an abbreviated entry, but I wanted to draw your
attention to this translation of a Das Magazinarticle.

To be honest, I don’t know how to tackle this issue, and I can
confidently predict that I will be talking much more about the legal and moral
implications of identifying people through big data in future posts.

But frankly, if all that is done with this data is effective
marketing, we’ll have gotten off easy. Frankly, I would not be at all surprised if human brains were fundamentally
hackable.
Obviously, the human brain is an extraordinarily complicated system, but each must still
operate deterministically at some level. And, as machine learning and
Artificial Intelligence methods improve, consistent and repeatable tricks will be found.

This is not to say, of course, that any one individual trick
will work on each brain. But, as the predictive metrics improve, the most
effective tricks for each individual brain type will be identified. Is it still
free will if your behavior can be reliably predicted?